Patching vs Packaging: Complementary Effects, Goodness of Fit, Degrees of Freedom and Intentionality in Policy ...

10.2139/ssrn.22733421-2

Bridging Certification and Community Forestry through NTFPs: A Case Study from Nepal

Issue - For a variety of reasons, community forestry is not always well suited to existing forest certification schemes. Using the case of Nepal, this paper considers the extent to which promoting the trade in nontimber forest products can complement, or even provide an alternative to, forest certification for timber while promoting sustainable community forestry. The paper develops recent work on the interaction of transnational business governance (TBG) schemes to suggest how these two approaches to sustainable forest management can work together productively

Transitioning to sustainability in Saskatchewan power production

This paper hypothesizes the future of Saskatchewan power production based on the theory of transition management. Power generation law and policy in Saskatchewan over the last century to the present is analyzed as a key component of a socio-technical regime. Understanding the legacy of law and policy is important given sustainability concerns and the realization that significant changes will be required in trajectories of development putting less strain on natural capital and ecosystem services. This paper examines the critical relationship between governance strategies at the macro socio and political landscape level and the particular policy mix that is found in the socio-technical regime of power generation in Saskatchewan. This exercise is informed by transition management theory and also the alternative explanations of path dependency. Switch points critical to the trajectory of power generation development are identified and used to illustrate and assess the plausibility of these theoretical concepts. Current landscape developments in Saskatchewan, including the emergence of concerns for human-induced climate change, the development of wind power and even the re-emergence of nuclear power generation as a policy option, may facilitate a transition towards greater sustainability. These sustainability paths are juxtaposed against the development of Saskatchewan’s oil sands and the development of carbon capture sequestration technology. Possible future alternative pathways to sustainable power production are outlined and critiqued in the current Saskatchewan governance context

Effects of exoplanetary gravity on human locomotor ability

At some point in the future, if mankind hopes to settle planets outside the Solar System, it will be crucial to determine the range of planetary conditions under which human beings could survive and function. In this article, we apply physical considerations to future exoplanetary biology to determine the limitations which gravity imposes on several systems governing the human body. Initially, we examine the ultimate limits at which the human skeleton breaks and muscles become unable to lift the body from the ground. We also produce a new model for the energetic expenditure of walking, by modelling the leg as an inverted pendulum. Both approaches conclude that, with rigorous training, humans could perform normal locomotion at gravity no higher than 4 $g_{\textrm{Earth}}$.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, to be published in The Physics Teache

Cardboard Coffins and Vaults of Gold: Debt, Obligation and Scandal in Ecuador's Response to Covid-19

Abstract As the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in Guayaquil—foreshadowing one of world's most devastating outbreaks—the Ecuadorian government paid $324 billion to bondholders, while forgoing much needed investment in pandemic preparation. This was the opening round for a series of struggles over the costs of containment and treatment of the virus; conflicts over debts foreign and domestic, taxes and corruption, wages and working conditions, and the control of public space. While the pandemic provided a context for the renegotiation of public and social obligations, however, the outcome was that the burden of pandemic containment was placed on those least able to sustain it— especially precariously employed, informal sector workers—deepening existing inequalities at the cost of lives and livelihoods. This paper addresses how this process was manifested through controversies in public culture, including traditional and social media, finding that the predominance of middle class and elite interests and preoccupations— together with the prevalence of scandal as a genre—sidelined the defense of popular lives and livelihoods and reinforcing systemic inequalities

Pathogenic Politics: Authoritarianism, Inequality, and Capitalism in the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract We provide an introduction to this special issue on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting some of the key findings and central arguments of the articles collected herein, and discussing their significance in relation to the broader political context of the pandemic. We address the roles of necropolitics and "necrosecurity", pointing to their relationships to colonial and eugenicist histories, as well as some of the ways in which a globally-ascendant authoritarian populism contributed to the often-disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic. We consider how unequal structures of social and public obligation were reproduced to the detriment of lives and livelihoods, and the challenges facing institutions of protection, care, and social reproduction. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which the pandemic may have opened up avenues for more systemic transformations—for good or for ill

Patching vs Packaging in Policy Formulation: Complementary Effects, Goodness of Fit, Degrees of Freedom, and Feasibility in Policy Portfolio Design

Thinking about policy mixes is at the forefront of current research work in the policy sciences and raises many significant questions with respect to policy tools and instruments, processes of policy formulation, and the evolution of tool choices over time. Not least among these is how to assess the potential for multiple policy tools to achieve policy goals in an efficient and effective way. Previous conceptual work on policy mixes has highlighted evaluative criteria such as "consistency" (the ability of multiple policy tools to reinforce rather than undermine each other in the  pursuit of individual policy goals), "coherence" (or the ability of multiple policy goals to co-exist with each other in a logical fashion), and 'congruence" (or the ability of multiple goals and instruments to work together in a uni-directional or mutually supportive fashion) as important design principles and measures of optimality in policy mixes. And previous empirical work on the evolution of existing policy mixes has highlighted how these three criteria are often lacking in mixes which have evolved over time as well as those which have otherwise been consciously designed. This paper revisits this early design work in order to more clearly assess the reasons why many existing policy mixes are sub-optimal and the consequences this has for thinking about policy formulation processes and the practices of policy design

The neglect of governance in forest sector vulnerability assessments: Structural-functionalism and “black box” problems in climate change adaptation planning

Efforts to develop extensive forest-based climate change vulnerability assessments have informed proposed management and policy options intended to promote improved on-the-ground policy outcomes. These assessments are derived from a rich vulnerability literature and are helpful in modeling complex ecosystem interactions, yet their policy relevance and impact has been limited. We argue this is due to structural-functional logic underpinning these assessments in which governance is treated as a procedural “black box” and policy-making as an undifferentiated and unproblematic output of a political system responding to input changes and/or system prerequisites. Like an earlier generation of systems or cybernetic thinking about political processes, the focus in these assessments on macro system-level variables and relationships fails to account for the multi-level or polycentric nature of governance and the possibility of policy processes resulting in the nonperformance of critical tasks